Are you tired of having to work with crappy UI-toolkits like the Sucker’s Widget Toolkit? Do you prefer a working out-of-the-box experience that runs the same way no matter what Operating System or hardware you use? Tired of having to cope with compatibility and native library issues?

That’s why I spend the day rewriting the MQL-Editor in Swing. The original editor was written using the abomination called SWT. But getting SWT code to run cross-platform is a nightmare and usually ends up in a lot of screaming and throwing stracktraces on each other. As I wasn’t able to get the thing running on my Linux-Box without exceptions. After once more tracing it down to the class of “SWT does not work with Swing” problems we faced over the last years, I cannot bear it anymore.

As the MQL-Editor is a thin layer on top of the Pentaho-MetaData system, rewriting this functionality is faster than trying to cope with the bad design of SWT. And above all: It is guaranteed to work within 24 hours, and it solves all the SWT-vs.-Swing integration problems by killing SWT. That’s a clear message, isn’t it?

So here we are. The Swing version covers all the functionality of the original dialog and adds some extra validation of the input (so that it is impossible to continue with invalid queries).